Bitterly Yours
by Naoki1
Summary: Draco reflects on his double life with shades of Draco/Hermione mixed in for good measure...


Title: Bitterly Yours  
  
Chapter: 1/?  
  
Author: Naoki / Naoki_pyromaniac@hotmail.com  
  
Rating/Warnings/Categories: PG-13, unrequitedlove!Draco, darkness! Death Eaters!   
  
Author's Notes: Nice, dark little drabble written while on a break from a chapter of 'Practical Love'...which will be finished. One day. I hope. Okay, being quiet now.   
  
~*~  
  
Bitterly Yours   
  
~*~  
  
How long can one maintain a double life?   
  
Moonlighting as student and Death Eater, it seems odd when the wizarding world has come to depend on the information provided by Draco Malfoy, that everyone in on the secret starts looking out for you if you were part of some disgustingly noble brotherhood.  
  
Leave out the part where I act the defender of Light, for I wouldn't want to spoil Weasley and Potter's little assumptions that I actually enjoy it, that I'm in the Death Eaters because I'm unusually cruel and fascinated by suffering...  
  
Publicly, I throw all those little motions of Gryffindor virtue at your feet because I don't need them where I go. Bravery fails where cowardly pretences win over.   
  
It's true that Slytherin and Gryffindor are more alike than it's comfortable to think. Except Slytherin have style, eloquence and pride...we're diamonds. All coldness and sparkle, Granger.   
  
Not that you'd care for diamonds, of course.   
  
You would sneer at that, rivalling our Potions Master in that department, and I wouldn't care. It's obvious what you're thinking. Death Eater. Scum of Wizardry. Hypocrite. So quick to name the things you hate, aren't you?  
  
Yet another similarity between us, Mudblood.   
  
And as for my double life and my reasons for doing so...  
  
Too bent on saving my own hell-bound carcass, you'd presume and you would be partly right.   
  
But for all your cleverness, your bookish ways...you have no idea, not a shred of essence in you allows you - gives you - the right to make assumptions about me.   
  
You aren't shrewd about people, you don't know how to manipulate...how to use them to your advantage, how to turn every strength of theirs into a weakness and how to turn every weakness into a wound...   
  
But they aren't books...is that why you hide away in the library? Books don't ask questions, books just share...and they bridge the gaps inside you, cool intellect over raw emotion I would prefer any day.  
  
It is my luck that I am cursed with passion. And adolescence.   
  
I remember the day that hulking, prehistoric excuse of a teen asked you to the Yule Ball, I watched from a gap in the row of dusty volumes that allowed me to see you, so startled by his question that you dropped the book of his foot and blushed as you both reached down for it and bumped your heads together before laughing. Awkwardly. Desperately. Flattered at the same time.   
  
Quite the amusing, clichéd romantic farce.   
  
There are so many unspoken rules in my house, in my family and I broke them all on the night of the Yule Ball. Leaving the girl I was to escort, the girl I had been engaged to from an hour after my birth, I hid away and watched you instead.   
  
It was more fun than spending company with a pair of rock look-alikes...with the mental processes to match, though it was entertaining to watch Pansy sitting between them wondering where her 'dearest dragon' had disappeared to.   
  
More fun because it made me feel like a true Malfoy, hidden in the shadows, despising the successful Mudblood...I didn't do it out of jealously, if I had I would have scorned your pathetic escort instead but I coveted this...resentment of you almost reverently.   
  
Sickening really, to think that once I would have considered that you had brought out the best - the power - in me. We do things in the name of hate, but the things we do for love are worse. So much worse.   
  
Now, as I dress in order to take myself to his side, to kiss the hems of his robes and make the Muggles cry...to spy and slither through the ranks. I wonder why I do it, when I could so easily follow Voldemort...because he might just win.  
  
Then it would be over for all the Muggleborns, the Mudbloods...and the filth...the real filth, us, would live on. Forever and ever. That's one ending of two.   
  
I could harbour you; keep you safe like a precious, forbidden flower. I wouldn't ask anything of you. I swear but you wouldn't accept it anyway, being a Gryffindor seems to imply that you're too proud to be helped.   
  
You're part of my plan, Granger. Be honoured by that fact.   
  
Perhaps my eyes have gone dirt-coloured from staring at you too long.  
  
Maybe I am rebelling by falling in love with Mudblood who excels at all the aspects of my world, who twists every single word my father said about the Muggleborn and throws them back in my face...with foolish Gryffindor pride nonetheless.  
  
Whatever the reason, I will remain bitterly yours.   
  
And I suppose with that, that one can maintain a double life for a very long time, if we leave out the part where my loyalties lie.   
  
I wouldn't want it to get out that I'm doing it for a Mudblood now.   
  
~*~ 


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